Holy shit the oceans are weird! What’s down there? Colossal squids? Buried cities? Alien Octopods? James Cameron? Who knows?! The guys are talking about mapping the oceans, and how little we really know about them. Seems like the whole “We know more about the surface of Mars than the bottom of the ocean” thing is true.
Hot Topics: Oceans, James Cameron, Titanic, Jacques Piccard, Bathyscaphe Trieste, Do Fish Explode? Baltic Sea Anomaly, What in tarnation is happening in Antarctica?
- James Cameron’s DEEPSEA CHALLENGE
2. Mapping the ocean floor
The entire ocean floor has now been mapped to a maximum resolution of around 5km, as a result we can see most features larger than 5km across in those maps.
NASA’s Magellan spacecraft mapped 98% of the surface of Venus to a resolution of around 100 meters. The entire Martian surface has also been mapped at that resolution and just over 60% of the Red Planet has now been mapped at around 20m resolution. Meanwhile, selenographers have mapped all of the lunar surface at around 100 meter resolution and now even at seven meter resolution.
3. Do fish explode?
Will deep sea animals explode at lower pressures? Nope, we’re just dumb. Dr. M at Deep Sea News describes it better than we ever could.
4. Baltic Sea Anomaly
We can’t do a whole episode without talking about weird, possibly-alien stuff. The Baltic Sea Anomaly is (probably) a rock formation that happens to look a lot like the Millennium Falcon. Some people have said it interferes with the operation of electrical equipment in the vicinity, due to a radio signal which it emits. This has not been verified.
5. Lake Vostok, Antarctica
A huge lake located under the East Antarctic ice sheet. By volume, it is the 6th largest lake in the world, slightly larger than lake Michigan. The assumption is that the lake has been sealed from the surface since the ice sheet formed, 15 million years ago.
